In “Reapers,” Jean Toomer doesn’t try to sugarcoat the human condition in an age of mass industrialization. For most people under the prevailing economic system, life is incredibly hard. They have to work long and hard just to keep body and soul together. In doing so, they lose something of their humanity, as they are treated more like cogs in a machine than as living, breathing human beings.

The reapers who work in the fields are contrasted sharply with the monstrous figure of the mowing machine, which has no understanding of what it’s doing. It just keeps mowing away, utterly oblivious to the consequences. What’s particularly disturbing here, and what gives the poem its tone of unremitting gloom, is the notion that the mowing machine represents man in the industrialized economy—an inhuman, unthinking piece of technology that is nothing more than a tool.

The juxtaposition of the mowing machine with the reapers is meant to remind us of this uncomfortable fact. It also alludes to the Grim Reaper, the personified figure of death wearing a black cloak and wielding a scythe. The machine will be the death of us, suggests Toomer, and it has already made a start by depriving us of our humanity.